Digital Distribution

Here the people at the Future Of Music Coalition speak with Sharky Laguana of the band Creeper Lagoon about his recent piece entitled “Streaming Music is Ripping You Off” in which he criticizes streaming services for their use of the “Big Pool” method of royalty distribution.

Is the idea that musicians should be allowed to participate fully in our country’s economy unrealistic? I hope not; though—barring the introduction of a completely new economy that treats musicians as valuable members of society­—I believe it will require a sea change. We will need to demystify the music industry and the nitty gritty of what it means to be a professional musician. We need: read more

Here the people at the Future Of Music Coalition speak with Sharky Laguana of the band Creeper Lagoon about his recent piece entitled “Streaming Music is Ripping You Off” in which he criticizes streaming services for their use of the “Big Pool” method of royalty distribution.

“This industry really has to get its shit together not only to generate revenue, but to get money to those people who actually need it and deserve it,” Casey Rae, CEO of the artist-forward nonprofit Future Of Music Coalition, said at the opening panel on transparency and its relation to money. He then noted that the music industry had three flavors of transparency to grapple with: Structural, or the understanding of how services generate and pay out royalties; deal and terms transparency, which examines how contracts lay down the terms for music’s use and compensation; and repertoire, which deals with the data and information management systems that track the consumption and usage of music.

As a result of the consent decrees, performers are typically paid much more than songwriters. That’s because performers are paid on an entirely different system, one based on direct deals negotiated between labels and the streaming services. Here’s a chart breaking down royalty splits by tech blogger Michael DeGusta for the ‘90s song “Low” by the band Cracker; you can see how small the slice has become for songwriters (in green).

Casey Rae, a musician and the CEO of advocacy group The Future of Music Coalition, describes the info here as “quite solid.” read more

Johnson’s piece, of course, rankled people who have devoted a lot of time to pondering this issue. The Future of Music Coalitionpenned a lengthy response to the article on their website, basically saying that statistics about wages do not take into account the widely varying amounts of success that people employed in the industry experience. Not everyone can be Kanye West but throwing a few people of his stature into the numbers paints a different picture than the reality faced by typical artists.

The story’s thesis and details have been well worked over since it was published. The Future of Music Coalition, an advocacy group for musicians, posted a long response on its site. The article’s author, Steven Johnson, responded in detail, and the group then answered him. The Times’s standards department considered a request for correction and decided against it.

You won’t find expert witnesses like that in “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t.” In fact, exactly three people are quoted in Johnson’s piece: Lars Ulrich, Steve Albini, and, um, me. He doesn’t talk to people who are living and working in the film, music, and publishing industries; he tries to tell his story with only numbers, and numbers simply don’t tell the whole story.